Great Disasters and Horrors in the World's HistoryGodbey, Allen Howard
History
Great Disasters and Horrors in the World's History
Godbey, Allen Howard
Disasters
Suppose that in the case of the door which the men were unable to open,
that the pressure had been as great as one pound to the inch. Then an
ordinary seven-by-three door would be held in place by a force of a ton
and a half. This same power has been observed to burst the
weather-boarding from frame houses, leaving the frame and inner surfaces
intact.
The reader will wonder why, in such cases, the windows do not burst out,
leaving the walls unhurt. This often occurs. But very great pressure
would evidently act just as does powder in a blast: the rock is rent ere
the tamping is torn out, though the latter has far less resistive power;
while very violent explosives do not even need any tamping in order to
utilize their force.
It would seem, then, that a house with open doors and windows has a
better chance of weathering a tornado, whether in respect to direct
impact of wind, or to the expansive force of air within, than a house
which is shut up. Here, again, quite a number of instances can be
adduced of houses caught suddenly thus by tornadoes and escaping unhurt,
while houses upon either side were demolished.
But that the direct force of the wind on the Louisville occasion was
very great is abundantly evidenced. Numerous are the apparently curious
freaks that were noticed. A city paper, four days after the storm,
contained the following:
“There are hundreds of the most interesting and miraculous incidents
connected with the tornado, showing the queerest sort of freaks of the
wind. A block of iron casting, weighing over one hundred and fifty
pounds, was blown into the second story of the Chesapeake, Ohio and
Southern Railway building, near the Union Depot. Nobody knows where it
came from, and the nearest building from which it could have come is
nearly one hundred yards away. Great sheets of tin roofing were dropped
upon Dr. Barry’s farm near Turner’s Station, forty miles from the city,
on the Short Line. In the ruins of a house on West Main street a clock
was found clinging to the wall. It was a large
[Illustration: ON NINTH STREET, LOUISVILLE.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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